MrHappy255 said:
Hey Werepossum you uh working for the oil companies cause it sure sounds like it.
I mean duh the thing wasn't great but it was the 70's people were still using 8 tracks and thought they were amazing. You mean we cannot improve on that old tech in 40 frikin years.
Ya people are stupid and lazy. I mean cmon yeah lets stick with 100 year old technology ie the combustible engine when there is so much else available.
I am sure you are one of the people who also say it is not cost effective to start a hydrogen fuel cell car cause it will take too much to change stations over. My god how lazy and greedy are people. I mean I am not a super granola freak but it would be nice if everyone tried a little to help out with the destruction of our envioronment instead of just looking at the cost. If cost were the only thing would nasa exist?
Secondly to those who say public transportation Ya that is great for urban dwellers but what about people who travel a little further. North america is not Europe nor Japan where you can travel a country in a few hours. (Excepting of course what used to be Russia).
Seriously ya lets keep grubbing for oil that is always the best option, friggin morons.
Actually not everyone capable of reasonably correct spelling and grammar is working for the oil companies. My point was that you had bought into the line that the 70s electric car was the bee's knees and that evil greedy capitalists conspired to take it away from you just to kill the planet. Stupidity is easy, but put some time and energy into researching what people tell you because people on both sides of the aisle will absolutely lie to you to further their own agenda. Perhaps you didn't notice, but I outlined several things that could (and should) be done to drastically curb energy consumption.
In real life I'm an architectural engineering electrical designer, meaning I design power, communications, fire alarm, and lighting systems (among other things) for buildings. I'm always up on new technology, new ways to do things better, cheaper, and/or more efficiently. (Unfortunately clients often only want cheaper, but if you pays the bills you makes the choices.) I transitioned my fluorescent lighting designs to T8 electronic ballasts back in the early to mid-nineties, as soon as it became practical. (The first T8 electronic ballasts were immediately practical in energy costs, but caused so many transients that they knocked each other out!) Today LEDs are just becoming practical for general purpose lighting, so I'm just now adding them to my designs. I drive a 4WD SUV, but it's a tiny little Tracker convertible that gets between 26 and 30 mpg under most conditions. So give me a
little credit on practicing a bit of what I preach, knowing that of which I speak, and having a little sense from half a century of life avoiding reality television.
As Saskwach so ably pointed out, hydrogen is not an energy source, but is merely an energy transfer medium; there is no accessible free hydrogen, and it requires more energy to free hydrogen from its bonds than the hydrogen can then produce. This is a constant, immutable law of physics. So are hydrogen fuel cell cars a bad idea? Not necessarily. For one thing, hydro or nuclear power can be used to produce hydrogen at night, when electrical demand is low. (This is not free energy - nuclear can be throttled back to a degree, and both hydro or nuclear power can be used to pump water up into elevated lakes at night, which then flows down through turbines during the day to provide cheap additional power for high-demand periods. This very practical use of otherwise wasted energy competes with hydrogen production, off-hours steam and/or hot water or ice production, and other creative and useful schemes.)
There may be other ways around the hydrogen bond problem, such as the genetically-designed, oil-pooping bacteria to which (again, I think) Saskwach linked, or other algal- or bacterial-driven processes freeing methane or complex hydrocarbons which can be captured and efficiently processed into fuel. Either way the infrastructure will be quite expensive, but hydrogen has the advantages of being a very clean fuel, producible by a variety of different methods and energy sources, and versatile in the way its energy can be extracted. One extremely neat thing I've seen is the invention - I think in Korea - of a fuel storage container structure that makes the container hold more natural gas than would an empty container of the same dimensions. Talk about a mind-bender! If this can be adapted to the hydrogen molecule, can be produced economically, and gives back the hydrogen without too much of an energy penalty, this could make hydrogen cars very practical.
But (again, as Saskwach pointed out) hydrogen can never be the solution to replacing oil; it can only be a piece of the solution. I should also point out that several years ago Bush proposed a national initiative of hydrogen infrastructure. It went nowhere under the Republican Congress, and it went nowhere under the Democrat Congress. Had that work been funded and begun when he proposed it, before gas prices went so astronomical, it would have spurred research and development on hydrogen storage and hydrogen engines because evil capitalists would want to be able to compete once the infrastructure was in place, earning money to buy their kids the G.I. Joe with the Kung Fu grip so that their wives would be happy and want to have sex with them (paraphrasing Eddie Murphy in
Trading Places.) Like electric cars this would require a sizable expansion in our power grid, at least until alternate means of hydrogen production become available, but would still have some advantage in scale and the great advantage of versatility in fuel.
I can also point out that although that particular era of electric cars were crap-in-a-cone, there are some nice niche electric cars today, like the Tesla, and some practical short-range, low end urban commuters as well. That's the beauty of capitalism - what you call greed - that someone who has amassed some capital will be willing to risk his capital making some new product or service, because if it's successful he'll earn wealth for himself and his family. But electric cars with the performance you quoted are probably decades away.
One last piece of mobile capitalism (damn but I'm a wordy bastard) - there are numerous prototypes running in commercial fleets today that are hybrids - but not electric. Instead they use hydraulic motors which are powered by ultra-high pressure hydraulic accumulators. A small gasoline or diesel motor runs a hydraulic pump which pressurizes the accumulator, which is basically nitrogen or another gas above a reservoir of hydraulic fluid. Once charged, valves feed high-pressure hydraulic oil to the hydraulic motors, driving the vehicle. For stopping, the valves are shifted to allow the vehicle's momentum to turn the hydraulic motors, re-pressurizing the accumulator. This works quite well with heavy fleet vehicles in relatively slow stop-and-go driving. Under these conditions the hydraulic hybrid can provide much better efficiency than electric hybrids.
So please give this some thought, do some research, and provide positive input rather than repeating mindless conspiracy theories and slogans of capitalism hatred. Those kinds of mantras can be repeated just as well by a parrot, which frees you up for other, more useful activities (like feeding the parrot.)
And will someone PLEASE tell that idiot Chuck Schumer to stop ordering oil companies to engage in research into alternative energy. That's the most asinine thing I've heard come out of Congress in quite awhile, in the same league as being the thinnest of Brazilian models (which is to say, an amazing if totally useless accomplishment.) If oil companies control alternative energy, alternative energy will cost as much as oil, at least as a function of the cost of production. That is how capitalism works. What we want are other greedy capitalist companies producing several kinds of alternative energy which compete with oil. That is also how capitalism works, only it has the added benefit of driving down costs for both competitors.
